Thomas J. Sargent
Thomas J. Sargent
Thomas John "Tom" Sargentis an American economist, who is currently the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics. As of 2014, he ranks fourteenth among the most cited economists in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims "for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth19 July 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Creating dynamic equilibrium macro theories and building a time series econometrics suitable for estimating them were both big tasks.
Lucas attended a conference on rational expectations at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1973. The day after the conference, I received a call from Pittsburgh.
What I really don't like is oversimplification.
Keynes was a very good economist. He was brilliant. He had wonderful insights. His work has inspired me many times.
I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.
I wasn't the brightest kid, not by a long shot. I was interested in football, in girls, in getting my work done with the least amount of effort.
I think you've got to watch out for anybody in high school who says he wants to become an economist.
There was a danger that skeptics and opponents would misread those likelihood ratio tests as rejections of an entire class of models, which of course they were not.
The first and most optimistic response was complete rational expectations econometrics. A rational expectations equilibrium is a likelihood function. Maximize it.
In the 1980s, there were occasions when it made sense to say, 'it is too difficult to maximize the likelihood function, and besides if we do, it will blow our model out of the water.
When I was a graduate student, estimating and interpreting distributed lags topped the agenda of macroeconomists and other applied economists.